Is Google’s caffeine going to be the new ‘stimulant’ for Search Engine Optimization?
Google has released its newest project for general public testing and is still waiting to be launched. Nicknamed “Google Caffeine”, it includes crawling, indexing, and ranking changes which appears to be replacing the existing Google search engine. Unlike Google’s previous project- Search Mash, the latest search engine contains a Developer preview which requests webmasters and power searchers to try it and give them some form of feedback. While Microsoft’s Bing contains changes that are user interface related, most of the changes Google has incorporated are infrastructure related and this is very evident in the search results.
Surprisingly the layout of all the search results has also been modified. Initially searching for a specific topic would produce a bunch of related links and results, whereas the Google caffeine now has a specific format. It first gives text related results for the particular topic in question, and then follows it up with videos and finally links which contain images of that topic. So in short a specific issue is not only provided with pages and pages filled with detailed information but halfway down, the page is supplemented with videos and images. This expands the vistas available for search engine results and opens up new opportunities for search engine optimization.
“Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve,” Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts said. This is Google’s latest initiative to display its relentless push to improve the quality of its service. “Google has let Caffeine quietly slip out. It talked about vertical specific searches while quietly doubling the speed and starts introducing real-time results and news feeds,” said Martin McNulty of the search marketing specialist Trafficbroker. With the feedback it seems to be getting, Google’s Caffeine is definitely the next platform for sites to gain leverage from and ensure they have high page ranks by filling their websites with the right amount of content and adding a visual flavour to their products.
Redemption of New Age music:
Showing tremendous growth over the past few years surprisingly in the phase of recession has been the industry of music and entertainment. Logically or rather psychologically speaking, this makes sense as people from all possible industries turn to music and entertainment as a relaxing outlet in times of excessive stress. And recession has definitely one stressful phase hitting wave after wave.Now we have established WHY the industry is experiencing growth. How are they achieving these numbers? The figures which represent this growth are even more staggering. While this industry can no longer rely on sales of physical formats, they have established that CDs account for 55 percent of the 60.7 billion revenue. Digital music alone is supposed to achieve a revenue of 14.8 billion in the year 2011 and the rate calculated for annual growth is also quite high given the performance of the industry over the years.
Simultaneously the media related branch of the industry has not been affected and has in fact flourished. Advertisements, television related promotion, films and video games from the entertainment industry have been growing steadily with increasing demands. Threats from piracy have in no way affected live concerts and music shows and for this reason artists from all over the globe have been involved with direct promotion, and this initiative has been a great asset to the industry.
Also with recent brand development strategies, large bands have been promoted along with large brands! U2 has been advertised with Apple while Bob Dylan and Victoria’s secret are being promoted together and lots of other musicians are being advertised along with corporates, to provide mutual growth to both the entities.
It is with regard to this growth displayed that Agriya released its product – Volume. Volume in essence is a software that focuses entirely on the music and the artists. It functions as a music portal that contains details of artists, tracks where users can listen to their favourite tracks and even buy them if they like them a lot. Volume is the perfect platform for new artists to feature and showcase their talent and all the music lovers looking for the ideal software that contains every possible feature integrated in one, its the perfect solution.
With the advancements the music industry has seen, you will possess the ultimate need of the hour where users can access your site for free or paid downloads. This will definitely satisfy millions of users worldwide who have been looking for a niche site that delivers on all their music requirements which simultaneously acts as a platform for new artists to touch base from. Interested in starting your own music site? Then what you are waiting for? Get it right away from the store at just $ 147. If you are still uncertain about the site, you can watch the volume demo.
A day in a webmasters life:
A lot of people mistake the webmaster’s job role to centre around reading and updating content for the website and posting articles. After analyzing what exactly webmasters need to cover we were provided with surprising results which indicated that a webmasters job is not so simple after all.
Comment moderation and spam are one of the hardest things a webmaster has to handle. There are thousands of spam mails stored away in a folder and webmasters find it very hard to locate it even using an anti spam software. Another aspect of the webmasters job is e mail support. E mails consist of tech support mails, requests, suggestions and sometimes even rude remarks and webmasters need to answer the flood of mails without much ado which in most cases is very cumbersome.
Security in a website is extremely important. Even though webmasters are not directly responsible for this, some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. Updating a script with all the new features decreases chances of it being hit by a virus or a bug of sorts as it will remove all the holes and modify the technology for it to function effectively. Webmasters also keep an eye on the development of new plug-ins and features. WordPress webmasters have thousands of plug-ins at their disposal that gets constantly updated and additions are posted on a regular basis. There also may be certain plug-ins that adds features increasing the efficiency of the system but webmasters prefer one content management system.
The next hurdle webmasters need to handle is to ensure that scripts to do not take much time to load. The delay in loading time can be caused due to external scripts or additional plug-ins and also by large multimedia contents and un-optimized images. In short webmasters need to eliminate all the problems that cause a delay in the loading of pages.
Not all websites contain advertisements and webmasters need to identify the ones that do. Not only have that, the effectiveness of the ads, quality of images, colours and even the type of the advertisers needed to be evaluated. Running a regular check on all these aspects and updating blogs and advertisements on the websites is very essential.
Finally the most important part is networking. Not all forms of networking are profitable but it is absolutely essential that the webmaster networks and gets in touch with niche webmasters in the similar field. This will enable them to exchange information and in an ideal situation the webmasters can join together and start a profitable business. Webmasters in general cover a lot of other responsibilities and the job role covers vast areas to increase the quality and performance of the website in a wholesome manner.
Social Media marketing – a tool for your business strategy
Social media marketing has been one of the growing branches of marketing. Even though it has not proven to be as effective as direct marketing, social media marketing is a concept that does not produce instant results and if planned well with a strategy will show long term results.It is very important to understand the basic idea behind social media marketing so that you can incorporate it in your business plan. This process revolves around utilizing four major online social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and Facebook and of course, lots more, to increase your company’s visibility. With time, the concept of marketing company products, establishing the brand and the quality through social networking sites developed into social media marketing.
Now how does one start the process? Through surveys and polls it has been established that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook are the four largest competitors in the industry and using them to establish your business is the ideal technique. So start Tweeting using twitter. But all this should be kept aligned to the business plan. For instance evaluate what you can offer to your followers. Whether its updating them with information they are looking for or sending them special reports or giving them early notice about a sale will all be effective planned and delivered well.
Once your company has established itself fairly well in one networking site, that’s when you move to the others. Slowly you can spread yourself to all the networking sites and with time link all your connections from all of them along with your blogs and you will find an integrated social media marketing plan. You can even spread out to micro blogging sites, and all other form of networking integrating them all together. So all in all the important fact is to ensure you have a good business plan in place so you can use the platform that social media marketing offers to deliver it.
Microsoft Bing – A threat to Google’s dominance in the industry?
The entire field of search engines was taken over after the emergence of Google. Primarily flourishing because of its strong networking and extensive data which it provides to its users, Google has surpassed all its competitors in quality and quantity when it comes to the usage of search engines. With Google dominating the entire sector of search engines, it has been considered quite an impossible task to match the levels of delivery Google provides. Microsoft Bing has managed to finally break these ideals and with all the advertisements it has made, seems to show a lot of promise.Industry experts on the other hand have stated that Google has not had a realistic competitor for years and for Bing to attain the quality and popularity that Google has established will also take time. Due to this Google has been able to give time to its smaller projects like Chrome OS, Google wave and several others. If by any chance Bing is seen to show stable growth and attains popularity among the masses, Google will release several other advanced features similar to its launch of the “Show options” feature that will once again overthrow any possible competitor.
All the same with all the advancements Microsoft has displayed many companies are looking to optimize their sites with Bing. Microsoft also launched a PDF called “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters“ which essentially states that all sites should continue with their solid regular practices which they have been using to optimize their ranks through SEO techniques and this will work well even for Bing. Some of them include using keywords like titles and meta descriptions for every page on the site, using keyword oriented and relevant URLs, themes per page in context and in relation with your keywords, submission of an XML sitemap and your site to Bing.
Ultimately there is a lot more to effective SEOs like the quality of your inbound links, along with other standard SEO best practices play significant roles and any special initiatives your site has taken to increase page ranks will also prove useful in Bing. It has also been reported that Bing is increasing its focus on local results than Google. So not only does increasing quality of your meta descriptions along with the regular SEO practices play a role, but having a unique content to attract consumers will all be picked up by Bing thereby giving you a direct leverage to increase your page ranks.
Microsoft Bing has established itself as one of Google’s most challenging competitors but whether it will be able to deliver on all its expectations and stand the test of time can be determined only based on its performance in the forthcoming years.
Crawl errors unravelled by Google
It is with experience that we have learnt that its extremely important for your site to have very high page ranks in search engines as this is one of the best ways to increase traffic on to your website. Once your site has secured a high page rank you can be assured of dozens of visitors going through your website everyday and this will directly generate an increase in your revenue. Now how you ensure a high page rank is the question.
One of the major hitches your site can suffer while going through Google’s search engine is the presence of crawl errors. These errors prevent your site from being recognised by the search engine as a result of which it will not be displayed in any of the search results pages. Google webmasters tools have solved a lot of hassles by specifying the areas where the sites need to be revamped in order to avoid crawl errors, in the Crawl errors section.
The first being the presence of HTTP errors as a result of which certain pages were not found by the search engine. Now these errors could have been due to serious hitches in your site which could involve HTTP errors, or it could have simply been the case of your site being down when Google was searching for these pages. If it’s the latter, then there is no cause for concern as long as the URL can be accessed now otherwise Google specifies the cause of your errors which you can then rectify. Also the errors in sitemaps are restricted to the URL submitted in the XML site and once Google specifies them they can also be corrected.
In some cases there are certain pages that Google could have crawled and displayed in search results but chose not to because Google thought the URL contained session IDs or URLs with multiple chain-style redirects. Otherwise it could have been because the page contained URLs that required cookies, or very long URLs, or finally pages that lead to other non existent pages. And in other cases Google webmasters has simplified resolving errors by specifying the URLS which contain the errors and also the URLs that lead to empty pages or pages with errors and once we get this data it becomes abundantly easy to add content to the pages and correct them. And finally there are some users who include robots.txt incorrectly in their files and webmasters specifies what exactly is wrong with the file. And once it is set right your pages are as good as new to be run by the search engines.
All in all, these are not errors that are permanent or will cause damage to your site, but can be corrected once directed by Google webmasters and this enables your site to increase its visibility and page rankings.
Social networking participants at risk
With an increase in the number of users involved in social networking, the number of risks which they face has proportionally increased. As sites like Facebook and Twitter are getting exceedingly popular among people of all sectors, the hackers seem to be using this in their favor and have been invading a large number of networking sites.According to statistics, Carlsbad based Breach Security said the number of Web security incidents was up 30 percent in the first half of 2009. Also it was ascertained that 19 percent of the attacks were targeted at social networking sites and 16 percent on media sites and another 12 percent were aimed at retail, technology, retail and government/political sites. Compared to last year when only government networks were majorly attacked, the year 2009 has seen a large number or attacks directed at social networking sites.
As social networking users have now become very vulnerable to attacks there are several precautions users can take to protect themselves from extensive damage.
To start with, users can start making backups of all the files on their computers or laptops. If you are an extensive networker, it’s best to protect your data from complete destruction by keeping backup files of all your information.
The next best thing to a protecting armor from the hackers is the availability of online security software. Usually most computers come with security software and if it does not, it’s very simple to get it installed and has proven to be very effective against unwanted viruses and hackers!
Another very important but extremely simple solution when it comes to hackers attacking you in social networking sites is to not give out too many personal details unless completely necessary. Even though you are allowed some control over the security setting, its best to avoid giving too much information. The rest is a bunch of precautions we are all familiar with – do not open links to any unfamiliar sites in your e-mails as your mails are the most susceptible areas of attack and also update your security software regularly to ensure its effective functioning.
Even though attacks on networking sites have become a large cause for concern, this is not a problem we cannot combat as long as we are equipped to manage the attack, remain vigilant when it comes to cybercrimes and ensure we follow security procedures.
Part 2: Two Mega divisions at Ahsan
This is the second part of the two mega divisions at Ahsan. Now it’s the turn of our project and product division heads to share their happiness and thoughts on achieving this position.
First let us see what our Product division head, Mr. Shridharan has in store for us.
- First I would like to congratulate you for achieving this great position at Ahsan. How do you feel now?
Thanks, I feel good… and now I’m in a position to adopt auxiliary responsibilities and fulfill the expectations of company needs. - Let us start with a warm up question, your team is the biggest team at Ahsan, how do you manage it?
Team size doesn’t really matter, when the team members acquire their responsibilities and are working towards the same goal. Earlier I worked with a single person and now my team has more than 50 members, anyhow it doesn’t make any difference. - What are your product team goals?
Our goal is to become a market leader in providing quality products in all domains. - What strategies do you put forward for achieving those goals?
We are currently formulating the strategies and would be happy to share once they have been finalized. - In this new product leadership role, what is your greatest challenge?
When we released our first product RAYZZ, we were met with less competition in the market world. But now it is very difficult to survive in the market. So, as of now, I can say, we have to raise AHSAN to become a Market Leader in product developments. - Tell me about the most challenging business decision that you’ve made when you became the product head
I am yet to come across one such situation. First step into my new role, we made a decision to release the product as Pro and Lite versions for iSocial, and we got a good response too. - Can you please tell us the role played by your team members in the product development discussion?
They always come up with great ideas to develop our products. In almost all of our products their ideas have been implemented to satisfy our customer needs. Consequently, we are releasing the updates and modules frequently for each product. - What are the major lessons you’ve learned so for from the experience of being the project manager?
Team management is not easy stuff; and it is not only controlling the people, we have to understand their capability and make decisions towards achieving our goals. If you are able to coordinate / share knowledge / guide your team members then it can be easier to manage the projects as well as the team. - Would you like to share anything else with us?
We believe the future of the IT industry will be one defined by the power of openness, whether it’s open source or standards. We have got some interesting products under development that look at the whole strategy of Ahsan. I think Ahsan is really well-known and now we’re addressing those capabilities in a broad range of products. Ahsan has a very experienced performance team that has worked for 8 years. Now this team is focused on Product development and some of the results as we have seen are very exciting.You are going to see some real breakthrough in performances in the subsequent years.
This section presents the interview session with Mr. Rajesh, the head of the Project division.
- Congratulations to achieve this peak position in Ahsan, how did you achieve this position?
Thanks. I think, you should ask the management. - Can we have the name of your first project that you have started as a project division lead?
I’m not quite there yet. Aravind is in the process of sharing details with me. - This question may be sound silly, but we are eager to get an answer from you. Are you a strict project headJ?
I think, you should ask the team - What are the goals you have set for yourself before starting a project and your plans to achieve them?
Always, the urge is to make the project better than previous projects, in terms of quality, and time spent on that. We try to achieve that by holistic approach, where every team member actively participate and collaborate. - Share one of the best and worst moments that you have come across in the path of the project manager?
Best moments are usually in where we can contribute and feel the ownership of the project. Worst moments are just the opposite of it where the work gets mechanical. - How can you manage a varied work environment where there are many projects and priorities come at once?
May try to invent a multitasking robot - Meeting deadlines is a great headache for the team leads. How do you manage it?
We apply previous experience in fixing deadlines, so that the deadlines are not unachievable. But, sometimes we get works that are new where we may not apply our experience to predict the deadline; in that case, we do some prototypes and pilot studies to predict the time frame. - We found your team working even during special occasions. How do you motivate them to work at such a situation?
On special occasions, we do not normally work—but we do involve in recruitment and tech sessions. As they provide leadership skills and also rejuvenating experience from normal day-to-day work, team may be willing to work at such occasions.
- First I would like to congratulate you for achieving this great position at Ahsan. How do you feel now?
Two more add-on modules add value to iSocial Pro edition
There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would like to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. As many people feel comfortable with blogs and forums to share their knowledge on anything, it’s a good idea to provide blog and forum features on a networking site. Now our iSocial pro, a social networking script comes with two more add-on modules named as blog and forum.Blog is the perfect place to share things you find interesting, get feedbacks on certain topics, promote businesses, give an opportunity to educate readers etc. So integrate your social networking site with the blog module and let your users post stuff on any subject, making them them stick to your site.
Forum is a great platform to interact with each other by exchanging tips and discussing hot topics. With the forum module, you can allow your users to actively discuss different topics with all forum members or just with friend circles as per their desire. Forum is just like a diary; with lots of information being exchanged in the forum, your users can refer to it all at any time and recommend it to their friends as well.
“Finding effective forums and blogs to share ideas and opinions on certain subjects are somewhat difficult for people. This time we have introduced two add-on modules to our iSocial pro, a social networking script to make it convenient for iSocial clients to let their site members share their knowledge with others” said, Ms.Sheerin, the Vice President of Marketing at Agriya.
See for yourself how you can manage and use blog and forum modules on the site, by visiting demo and place your order at customer area.
For more details visit www.isocial.in.
Get updates of Swine flu on popular social networking sites
Swine flu is the buzz word among people at the moment. It is caused by influenza A virus in pigs. Now humans have also been affected by the virus A H1N1. The symptoms of swine flu in humans are similar to those of seasonal influenza namely chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, weakness and general discomfort.
As social media are acting as a clear cut medium to share any subject and interact with others, people are turning to their favorite networking services to provide H1N1 flu updates to their friends and family.
On Twitter, users are now tweeting about Influenza A H1N1 including preventive measures, best meditations, the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement, the symptoms of swine flu based on their personal experiences etc. Here are some messages tweeted by the site users:
“I have recovered from swine flu. I had a sore throat, fever and was feeling very tired when I went to the general practitioner who asked me to go for the test at the screening centre.”
Another member of the same community who has H1N1 virus, said: “I have got swine flu now. It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought. Am on Tamiflu.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provide social media tools like widgets, mobile information, online instructional videos and Swine flu RSS feeds for people. Starting today, you can view images of H1N1 flu from the CDC Flickr site or the CDC Public Health Image Library, follow Swine flu updates on Twitter and watch Videos related to Swine flu on YouTube.
We hope social media will create a great awareness among people and help them stay away from Swine flu.
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